I hated those periods most of all. Those moments, those days, sometimes weeks, when she reverted to her old self and became the Samina of grazia again. I didn’t understand then what she was doing, what was happening to her, what she was making happen. And so those days were just reminders of what I’d lose when she retreated into her self-imposed darkness again.
Incandescent. Aflame. Those were the words we all used about her. She was supposed to be the Olympic torch, the fire that never burnt out. I would have thrown myself into that fire to keep it alight, but that power was never mine. So all I could do in those last two years was watch with dread each time she emerged into brilliance.
‘That was the cruellest thing she did. Remind us what she used to be like, what she could be like.’
Shehnaz Saeed closed her eyes for a long moment. ‘It was like watching beautiful, fragile butterfly wings exploding out of a chrysalis. It could never be anything but short-lived.’
Stay believing that, I thought. Keep loving her without anger. I won’t be the one to tell you the truth.
‘Can I ask you something?’
‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Anything.’
‘Why did you stop acting? It wasn’t because you were planning to have more children, was it?’
‘I don’t know how that story got started. I never publicly gave any reason. Well, I suppose that is how the story got started. People need reasons, don’t they? If you don’t give them one, they’ll pick one for you. I just stopped. That’s it.’
‘So it’s just coincidence that it happened just a few months after the Poet died? No correlation there?’
She stood up and walked towards the windows. It was dark now. She drew the heavy silk curtains. ‘I was offered a part which would have required being away from Karachi for several weeks. I didn’t want to leave her. And I was recently married — he’d put this house in my name — so my bank account didn’t require me to work any more. Things snowballed in my mind after that.’
‘You quit acting so that you could be around for my mother at all times?’
‘Yes. But don’t think of it as a sacrifice. It was entirely self-serving.’
‘Tell me another. I know how difficult it was to be around her in those days.’
‘What was difficult was the jealousy, in the beginning. Before I understood the way depression works. What was difficult was the period in which I’d think, why can’t I make you stop going mad with grief over him? Why does he have such complete power over you, even in death?’
Hearing her say that was like flipping through an old family album and finding one of your own features — the one you most despise — on the face of someone who’s turning deliberately towards the camera at an angle designed to pronounce that exact feature. And looking beautiful doing it.
‘And then what? You just learned to live with it?’
‘I learned to understand what she was going through.’ She gestured to the books beside me. ‘What an odd breed humans are. We climb mountains, delve beneath the sea, discover how to leave the planet entirely — but the ultimate zone of exploration, the unknown country more mysterious even than death, is right here.’ She tapped my head. ‘Right within us. We use only ten per cent of our brain, and that figure is high compared to how much of it we actually understand. We think it’s a part of us, and it is, but it also controls us. It’s smarter than us, so much smarter. Always several hundred steps ahead. Some of its decisions, it lets us in on — other decisions it simply executes and we never know about them even as they shape our entire lives.’
‘The tyranny of character,’ I whispered.
‘Tyranny. Yes, that’s a good word. All power dynamics — all instances of repression and authoritarianism and manipulation — are just failed metaphors for the ways our own brains interact with us. That was the grand irony of your mother’s life — she could fight all those external tyrannies, but not the internal one.’
‘Wait. What?’
‘The Poet’s death released it. Released something in her brain. Something that ate her up. And once it was released, it stopped having anything to do with the Poet. That’s the thing I needed to understand. That’s what you must understand, Aasmaani. Understand the tyrant within her.’
‘How do you know you’re not just making up a story that’s bearable?’
‘Darling, there was nothing bearable about watching your mother go through that. Near the end she even said, “I would give anything to believe this is about his death. I would give anything to have something to which I could attach this. If there’s a cause I can grapple with it. If there’s a reason, there’s a way out.” But in the end, that’s what she couldn’t believe — that there was a way out.’ There were tears in her eyes now.
‘You tell yourself one story, I’ll tell myself another. Either way, Mama is lost to both of us. Does it really matter how we get to that bottom line?’
‘It isn’t the bottom line, Aasmaani — it’s the starting point of how we learn to live without her. She didn’t kill herself because you weren’t reason enough for her to stay alive — that’s not why she did it. And it isn’t that she was leaving you for the Poet. Those aren’t the reasons. You must accept those aren’t the reasons. She hung on to an intolerable existence for two years because of you. Not me — I’ve always known that. She didn’t hang on for me. She did it for you. She did it until she simply couldn’t do it any more.’
I stood up. I couldn’t even be angry with her for consigning my mother to the role of suicide victim. If that was the panacea she needed to cope with Mama’s disappearance, let her have it. ‘I really have to go.’
Someone blew a car-horn outside the gate. ‘That’s Ed. He’s home. Please, don’t let me make you leave. He won’t forgive me for that.’
I nodded. ‘Did he hate my mother? If he believed you were having an affair…’ The enormity of what he had kept concealed from me was only just beginning to register.
‘Oh no. Not at all. He adored her. He hated me for what he believed was my seduction of a grieving woman. Or used to. But it’s the funniest thing. Sometimes there’s almost a symmetry in the world, isn’t there? The other day, just after he’d spent an evening with you, he came into my room and he said, “Amma, I’m beginning to understand love.”’ She stood up, put her arms around me and kissed my forehead. ‘Thank you for that. Now, go on, go up and wait for him. Tell him as much or as little as you want about our conversation. I advise the former. And Aasmaani, borrow these books and read them.’ She gestured back to the pile on the sofa. ‘That’s all I’m asking.’
I embraced her without answering and then ran up the stairs to the second floor. I stopped at the first door on the left. It was a linen closet. I laughed softly to myself and opened the second door, which led into a TV lounge. I was about to walk in when I changed my mind and stepped through the third door into his bedroom.
It was a long room, with a bed at one end, next to a window which looked out on to the garden. At the other end was a built-in wardrobe and a desk with a laptop computer on it. There were bookshelves along the length of one wall. I walked over to the bedside table. A lamp, a copy of Rafael Gonzales’s Umbrellas, which I had been urging him to read, a framed picture of a very young Ed hugging his mother. I opened Umbrellas. A bookmark fell out. I picked it up and saw it was a picture of me, which he’d taken from my flat two days earlier when he’d come over to watch the second episode of Boond. We’d stayed up talking until late that night, and I’d fallen asleep on the sofa with his arms around me. I’d woken up the following morning to find myself in bed; on the pillow beside me were buds of raat-ki-rani which had filled my dreams with gardens and moonlight.